I am sure that most of you are already aware that Guylty’s father died last week after a sudden and unexpected illness. The obituary for her father appeared in their local paper yesterday, and it asks mourners not to send tangible expressions of sympathy to the family. The desired beneficiary of any memorials is a Heimatverein via a German bank account.

Since this will be a bit difficult for people outside of the EU to participate in, Servetus and I talked it over and we thought that a donation to one of Richard Armitage’s Just Giving charities on behalf of fans might be in order (similar to the one that was organized in memory of Servetus’ mom last summer). I have set up a new PayPal account to collect donations which will then be donated at the Just Giving site.

I don’t know about you, but I really enjoyed going through all the cards, vids and letters and it warmed the cockles of my frozen heart to see evidence of friendship, affection and a heavy sprinkling of RA admiration.

OK, not enough to actually finish the projects I had abandoned, but I needed something quick, easy and fun.

A while back I had come across this post at Epbot which involved metal tape (aluminum foil tape to be precise), black acrylic paint and plenty of beating and bashing.

Steampunk-licious? Sign me up!

Every so often I send out a card to my fellow Armitage Admirer as way of thanks for something tasty I received from them, but I always struggle to come up with a funky design, or I’m out of cardboard to print it on and so on, so I needed a fun card that was quick to make and purdy 😉

The biggest challenge was to find that aluminum foil tape.

After checking out some hardware shops (I know, it was scary…) it turned out that it’s used for fireplace isolation stuff, so you should find it in that section.

I also bought “drywall seam tape” which is a fancy name for adhesive mesh thingy and some foam letter stickers so I could lovingly create the “Armitage Army” sign.

Once I stuck the letters on, I started adding the seam tape and then covered the whole area with the aluminum tape.

The process was OK, word of advice though:

I felt the letters I had used were a bit too small, therefore when I started to push the tape down to make them more visible the tape punctured in a few places.

Maybe had they been a bit bigger, it would have been easier to really get into all the nooks and crannies and they would have been clearer (“m” was particularly challenging…).

I also think you should avoid having tape seams on the letters.

Having said that, the black acrylic paint luckily covered any rips and I did make my card plenty grimy!

I should add that I wasn’t using any professional tools, I was free-styling with the rivet holes and such, so maybe if I had a clay tool, it would have been easier.

Anyway, now I’m thinking about what else I could do:

cards? notebook covers? an image to stick in a frame and hang on the wall?